At last some poems

[Michael]

I have recently wandered into the poetry of Lucille Lang Day and have
been reading her newest book The Curvature of Blue. She has a unique
science background and it shows in her poetry. I have included a
sampling of three somewhat different poems by her.

Here is her official bio:
LUCILLE LANG DAY'S poetry collections are God of the Jellyfish
(Cervena Barva Press, 2007), The Book of Answers (Finishing Line
Press, 2006), Infinities (Cedar Hill Publications, 2002), Greatest
Hits, 1975-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2001), Wild One (Scarlet
Tanager Books, 2000), Fire in the Garden (Mother's Hen, 1997) and Self-
Portrait with Hand Microscope (Berkeley Poets' Workshop and Press,
1982), which was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and
Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She is
a co-author of How to Encourage Girls in Math and Science: Strategies
for Parents and Educators (Dale Seymour), and the author of the
libretto for Eighteen Months to Earth, a science fiction opera with
music by John Niec. Her first children's book, Chain Letter, was
published by Heyday Books in 2005. She received her M.A. and M.F.A. in
creative writing from San Francisco State University, and her M.A. in
zoology and Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the
University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of
Scarlet Tanager Books, she is also director of the Hall of Health, a
museum in Berkeley.

Usually I am not a great fan of poetry where you need a page of notes
to understand the allusions and in the first poem, Although, that
could be true. But I like what she does in Although despiet all the
allusions I had to go search for ( thank goodness for the web and
Wikipedia! After the three poems I have a list of notes about
allusions and words/names used in Although.

Hope you enjoy these.
Michael

Although

The morning escapes like a savvy prisoner
although the clockwork universe fails
in a sea of multicolored leaves.

My skin has developed a grainy texture
although geese mate for life
and time stands still in a black hole.

The zyzzyva’s body is oblong
although intelligence is a natural consequence
of the interactions of quarks and leptons.

Sunlight on a spinning propeller looks like an EKG trace
although 61 percent of smokers
began the habit before the eighth grade.

Orange and other warm hues can make you overeat
although the rate at which the chords change
determines the harmonic rhythm.

Only 5 percent of smokers start after age 21
although fresh apples float
and dieters should surround themselves with blue.

Emily Dickinson baked bread in a brick house
although Rael says all life on Earth
was cloned by extraterrestrials .

Apples belong to the rose family
although melodies of Gesualdo’s “Io Parto”
depend on words to provide structure and rhythm.

Neptune’s surface consists of frozen gases
although the clarion trumpet
is a uniquely baroque instrument.

Einstein disliked spooky action at a distance
although Churchill said success consists of going
from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

The wave particle duality edges the oceans with gold
although space-time has a porous texture
and Einstein said we can’t see God’s cards.

Electronic devices depend upon quantum tunneling
although the subatomic universe is fuzzy as a baby seal
and the phone never rings in Shakespeare’s plays.

Reject Jell-O

The man I married twice—
at fourteen in Reno, again in Oakland
the month before I turned eighteen—
had a night maintenance job at General Foods.
He mopped the tiled floors and scrubbed
the wheels and teeth of the Jell-O machines.
I see him bending in green light,
a rag in one hand,
a pail of foamy solution at his feet.
He would come home at seven a.m.
with a box of damaged Jell-O packages,
including the day's first run,
routinely rejected, and go to sleep.
I made salad with that reject Jell-O—
lemon, lime, strawberry, orange, peach—
in a kitchen where I could almost touch
opposing walls at the same time
and kept a pie pan under the leaking sink.
We ate hamburgers and Jell-O
almost every night
and when the baby went to sleep,
we loved, snug in the darkness pierced
by passing headlights and a streetlamp's gleam,
listening to the Drifters and the Platters.
Their songs wrapped around me
like coats of fur, I hummed in the long shadows
while the man I married twice
dressed and left for work.


If you want to read the historical back story for the next poem you
can go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/arts/music-the-st-louis-blues-saved-his-life-at-auschwitz.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

PLAYING "ST. LOUIS BLUES"
AT AUSCHWITZ

Consider all possible universes:
the ones that quickly collapse
into black holes, the ones filled
with double-crested cormorants,
Queen Anne's lace and quasars,
the ones that glow with blue
and yellow stars that last forever,
the ones with only planets wrapped
in poison atmospheres and deserts.

Picture the planet Earth in one
possible universe, where at first
only a faint sound comes out
of the trumpet at Louis Bannet's
frozen lips, then a few sputtered notes
as the guards walk toward him.
Frostbitten from head to toe, he lifts
the trumpet, tries again, and the guards
stop when "St. Louis Blues" begins.

They change like water going
from ice to liquid, like the universe
blooming from nothing at the Big Bang.
He plays as people go off to work.
He plays as the trains come in,
"Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea,"
in one possible universe, where moments
are stacked liked cards, the past with no
existence, except in the present.

Moments are shuffled and reshuffled
to give the illusion of time and history.
Everything happens at once and forever.
Somewhere, Bannet is still playing
"Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Tiger Rag"
at a party for Dr. Mengele, hidden
from the guests behind some plants,
and in all universes where trumpets blast,
as long as he plays, he lives, they dance.

Notes for Although:
• Zyzzyva (pronounced IPA: /ˈzɪzəvə/) is a genus of tropical American
weevil often found in association with palms. It is also the last word
in many English language dictionaries such that it is sometimes used
to mean "the last word".
• Rael is a character from the first Star Trek episodes
• Carlo Gesualdo, known as Gesualdo da Venosa (March 8, 1566 –
September 8, 1613), Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was an
Italian music composer, lutenist and nobleman of the late Renaissance.
He is famous for his intensely expressive madrigals, which use a
chromatic language not heard again until the 19th century; and also
for committing what are amongst the most notorious murders in musical
history. He committed double murder when he discovered his wife
“cavorting” with another aristocrat.
• Leptons are a family of elementary particles, alongside quarks and
gauge bosons (also known as force carriers). Like quarks, leptons are
fermions (spin-1⁄2 particles) and are subject to the electromagnetic
force, the gravitational force, and weak interaction. But unlike
quarks, leptons do not participate in the strong interaction.There are
six flavours of leptons, forming three generations. The first
generation is the electronic leptons, comprising the electrons (e−),
and electron neutrinos (νe); the second is the muonic leptons,
comprising muons (μ−), and muon neutrinos (νμ); and the third is the
tauonic leptons, comprising tauons (τ−), and tauon neutrinos (ντ).
Each lepton has a corresponding antiparticle – these antiparticles are
known as antileptons.
• spooky action, In physics, action at a distance is the interaction
of two objects which are separated in space with no known mediator of
the interaction. This term was used most often with early theories of
gravity and electromagnetism to describe how an object could "know"
the mass (in the case of gravity) or charge (in electromagnetism) of
another distant object. According to quantum mechanics, an
experimenter could entangle a pair of particles, separate them by vast
distances, then instantaneously change the state of one by changing
the state of the other - even at distances of millions of light
years.This "spooky action at a distance," according to Albert Einstein
and two colleagues, was a direct result of quantum mechanics if it
failed to have more-classical underpinnings. It so defied common sense
that they refused to accept quantum mechanics as a complete
explanation for how physics really worked at the level of the very
small.
• The phone never rings in Shakespeare, may or may not be an allusion
to Borge’s short story “Shakespeare’s Memory. The main protagonist and
narrator is Hermann Sörgel, a self-described devotee of Shakespeare.
After giving a short list of works that he has written on Shakespeare,
he tells the story of how he came to be in possession of Shakespeare's
Memory: He meets a man named Daniel Thorpe at a Shakespeare
conference, and after relating a story about a ring that had a price
so high it could never be sold. Thorpe then offers Sörgel
Shakespeare's memory, and after a short retelling of how he managed to
get hold of it, passes it on to him. The memory, Thorpe says, has to
be 'discovered': Sörgel whistles melodies he has never heard, and
slowly starts seeing unknown faces in his dreams. Later, he gains
insights into Shakespeare's works and techniques, and considers but
decides against writing a biography. Soon after, Shakespeare's memory
almost overwhelms his own: one day he becomes confused as he does not
recognise engines and cars. Finally he decides to give away the memory
by telephone: he phones random numbers (sparing women and children
from the memory), and at last gives the memory to a man on the other
end of the phone.